Editing & pages

Make scans searchable with OCR

Recognizing text

A scanned or photographed page is, to a computer, just a picture until Colophon runs on-device text recognition over it. A quick recognition pass runs automatically right after a scan or import, just to feed library search — it doesn't change the page itself. To make that text selectable and copyable on the page, run Recognize Text (OCR) manually from the document's menu.

Note

Until you run Recognize Text (OCR), text that's part of a scanned image is invisible to selection and editing: it exists on the page, but Colophon can't reach it as text yet, even though it's already searchable from the automatic indexing pass.

What becomes searchable

Once you run Recognize Text (OCR), the page's words become selectable and copyable straight off the image, the same way they would be on any other page.

The invisible layer, made visible

Recognized text sits over the image as an invisible layer, aligned line by line with what's on the page, so what you see is the scan itself rather than a wall of overlaid text. Select-text mode lets you select and edit that hidden layer directly when you need to correct a misread word.